Designing parallel PDR

Abstract

Property Directed Reachability (PDR) is an efficient model checking technique. However, the intrinsic high computational complexity prevents PDR from meeting the challenges of real world verification. To address this problem, this paper introduces the parallel algorithm P3 based on: 1) partitioning of the input problem, 2) exchanging of learned reachability information, and 3) using algorithm portfolios. The generic nature of the proposed techniques makes them immediately suitable for software verification. This paper investigates the benefits of these techniques while taken individually and when combined together, implemented using distributed computing environment on top of the SMT-based software model checker Spacer. In our experiments over SV-COMP benchmarks we observe up to an order of magnitude speedup with respect to the sequential implementation with twice as many instances solved within a timeout.